


To Bite the World

by gin_eater



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Ending, Buenos Aires, F/M, Happy Murder Family, Tooth-Rotting Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-10
Updated: 2018-11-10
Packaged: 2019-08-21 11:02:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16575209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gin_eater/pseuds/gin_eater
Summary: "She will contain multitudes," he says.Bedelia smirks a little, recalling the body count of her cravings over the past few months."She already does."





	To Bite the World

**Author's Note:**

> It probably says something about me that I can only stand fluffy happy kid fic when the parents are two unrepentantly reprehensible characters. C'est la vie.
> 
> Written for the November electric_couple prompt, "birthday," with the other prompt, "reunion," worked in more thematically than circumstantially.

_Teeth hadst thou in thy head when thou wast born,_  
_To signify thou camest to bite the world..._  
\--William Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI

 

 

The nursery is coming along well, outfitted in the bisques and greys of Classical sculpture. Its walls are adorned with a grisaille mural of woodland creatures apt to befriend virtuous exiled nobility, albeit painted with a beautiful realism uncommon to most animated films. A family of deer -- stag, doe, and little fawn -- gambol through a copse of birch trees, among whose branches starlings whisk and perch. In the underbrush, a fox crouches low near the mouth of a rabbit warren, forever poised in promise of a pounce.

The only real color in the room is overhead: a deep delft blue ceiling constitutes a nocturnal backdrop for constellations rendered in gold leaf, done in the style of Urania's Mirror.

Underneath Orion, Bedelia reaches into the ornately carved burled walnut cradle for a plush Steiff lamb filled with cherry stones, made to hold gentle heat; changes her mind; sets it down, and chooses the little Simmental calf instead.

"Do you remember the first time you cooked for me?" she asks, knowing without looking that her husband, ever a creature of liminal spaces, is watching her from the threshold.

"I remember perfectly," Hannibal replies. " _Tête de veau en sauce verte._ "

He recalls the sound of the calf's skull knocking against the sides of the stockpot as he poached it clean of its remaining flesh. In this room, the memory takes on the patina of a sacrifice: innocence for innocence.

In this room, it feels like a fair trade.

His wife's eyes don't leave the soft toy in her hands as she asks, "Will you make it for me again?"

Hannibal joins her by the cradle and picks up the lamb himself, marveling at the reversal of roles that has allowed the Big Bad Wolf to keep the girl in its belly while a sheep sits full of stones.

"Of course," he says. "I will set our butcher to the task first thing tomorrow. Until then, there's still a little _pâté de foie prêtre_ in the fridge, if you're hungry now."

She is always hungry these days, a fact that endlessly delights him, although she herself was initially reluctant to disclose the nature of her cravings, unsure if they were genuinely hers or merely some macabre side effect of whose child it is that she carries. In the end, she concluded that it didn't really matter: a shared bloodstream might well mean that whatever it is became her own at the moment of implantation. "There might exist certain traits that can run both ways in a family," her husband had hypothesized when she finally gave voice to her misgivings; besides which, some women are compelled to eat burnt matches and clay during pregnancy -- burnt offerings, even of the sort for which she is lately ravenous, seem almost banal in comparison. At least she craves something that is a well-established member of the food chain.

"Is there any crostini?" she asks.

Hannibal presses a kiss to her temple. "Ten minutes," he says, before replacing the lamb and departing for the kitchen to slice and toast a baguette.

Bedelia, too, sets down her calf, and wonders distantly if her tender breasts are heavy with a fluid rather redder than colostrum.

* * *

 

It's well past midnight when he slides his key into the front door lock. As with everything else with which the house has been appointed, the deadbolt itself is a sensory experience, solid and heavy as it tumbles back inside the door, which opens nigh soundlessly, wood ghosting a breath above the tiled foyer floor.

He slips off his shoes and pads silently through the darkness directly to the kitchen, where he places his waxed canvas shopping bag on the soapstone counter, cuffs his shirtsleeves, and immediately sets to washing his hands and retrieving the necessary utensils -- mixing bowl, boning knife, cranial saw. The body will be found tomorrow, cut low on the abdomen in the manner of a cesarean section, the handful of smooth river rocks inserted into its womb baffling authorities, as well as its lack of a head -- for a couple of days, anyway, until a grandmother gathering mushrooms at the edge of a forest stumbles upon a milky skull mantled by a hooded red pullover, evocative of a blood moon, mounted on the handle of an axe.

When he has finished with his prep work, when the kitchen is cleared and the brain left to chill overnight in the refrigerator, he makes his way to the top floor of the house.

He finds the master bedroom open, as well as the French doors that lead to the balcony; the bed itself is unoccupied. Hannibal follows the path of the Argentinian breeze outside, to the robed figure standing, arms folded, near the balustrade.

She all but glows in the moonlight, the cream silk of her peignoir precisely one shade paler than her skin and one shade cooler than the lustrous gold of her hair. Were _la Luna_ to possess a mortal form, Hannibal is certain she would choose the face and physique of this woman: his rich-tressed, stainless Queen of Night, who in profile cuts a waxing crescent in the balmy early autumn air.

"Did I wake you?" he announces himself, looping strong arms around her waist from behind, splaying his hands atop the precious burden there that has, over the past few months, steadily rounded his wife's trim, petite frame.

Bedelia leans back into him, dropping her head to rest on his clavicle, sighing when he kisses her neck, "Mm, no. _She_ did."

"Naughty girl," Hannibal scolds, and feels a pointed kick against his right palm. "Impertinent, too."

"Perhaps you can teach her some social graces. I certainly haven't had any luck."

She feels Hannibal drop to one knee behind her and gently turn her around, until he's eye to fetal eye with her abdomen.

"Are you listening, little one?" he asks her midsection with affected sternness. "While I appreciate that you are eager to test the boundaries of what you can do, you are costing your poor mama a great deal of sleep. If this behavior persists, I am afraid you will be subjected to a severe toe-nibbling when you are born. It will be very unpleasant."

Anyone else would fear that he means it; Bedelia only smiles, and combs both hands through his hair, allows her thumb to graze the scar on his cheek. Her belly remains taut and smooth and still.  
  
"I think she may have gotten the message."

Hannibal plants a soft kiss just above Bedelia's navel, the place where she was once nourished as her body nourishes their child now. He looks up, and feels the great black beast of his love for her -- for both of them -- lift its head and howl.

* * *

 

Two days before Christmas yields the six most excruciating and exhausting hours of Bedelia's life, and she counts herself lucky that they were only six in number.

Everything else is equally fortunate tens -- fingers, toes, APGAR scores.

She regards the infant latched to her breast with mild amazement. Not an hour earlier, she was one-half of a couple; now, she is one-third of a family. Her mouth tastes of blood and honey from the small piece of afterbirth Hannibal fed her to prevent postpartum hemorrhaging. Recipes for its further consumption were discussed and decided weeks ago, to his great satisfaction and amusement -- finally, he will indeed get to make a meal of her.

The baby's eyes are blue, but dark, and Bedelia knows they will be Hannibal's in a few months, maroon flecked with sparks of sunstone-gold. Her hair isn't much, a dusting of pale floss that may or may not burnish as she ages. A faint beauty mark like the one above her mother's mouth distinguishes her plump left cheek, in the position the French call "courage."

Bedelia looks over at her husband, pressed up against her side on the bed, equally entranced by the tiny, perfect creature they've somehow made together. He looks almost as tired as she, but his gaze is bright and alert as ever. His hands that helped guide their baby into this world are wrapped around both mother and child, composing an unlikely but nonetheless sincere picture of domesticity and complete contentment.

"Violet Clarice," he says, rolling the name around in his mouth like wine. In her seventh month, Bedelia had hinted that he would have her support, if he wished to call their daughter for his sister; Hannibal, after giving the notion some thought, had opted against it, perhaps reluctant -- or fearful -- of coloring the present with too indelible a past.

Color, though, yes -- not crimson, not the color of great dragons, or the spray of blood on snow, but aubergine, deep purple: Mischa's favorite; one consonant removed from being synonymous with ferocity, but a color that, in Hannibal's mind, knows only love.

Violet for purple, and Clarice for clarity, illumination; for a Promethean enlightenment that Bedelia in particular holds sacred, although she will only smile if asked to explain precisely why.

Violet Clarice. Darkness and light, death and life, inferno and paradise.

"She will contain multitudes," he says.

Bedelia smirks a little, recalling the body count of her cravings over the past few months.

"She already does."

Hannibal, of course, comprehends the joke immediately, and laughs, as Abraham ought to have, in the face of God. He thinks of Saturn, and the consumption and disgorging of children, an antithesis of birth that is not death. He thinks of shattered teacups, not reformed but reunited with veins of gold, their beauty and value increased by a reordering of entropy though patience and praxis, and not the elusive, illusive regression of time.

How remarkable to learn that not only does a life lived accrue in the cracks, but that a life not yet lived may as well -- trauma not undone, but its scar braided into a tattoo, like the beating of the small, swift heart that has, at only one hour old, already devoured his own.

**Author's Note:**

> I hemmed and hawed for a bit about including Clarice in their daughter's name, but the part of me that idolized Starling while growing up remains stubbornly resentful of her story basically being given to a man (and I say that as a gay who generally believes that anything can be improved by being made gayer) and then lauded for it, when her transformation in Harris' original text was considered by many to be one of its biggest failings at the time it was published. I can't help but feel there's a nagging, sexist double standard there. Anyway, as Bedelia, to me, best represents in the series who Starling ultimately became in the books (Bedelia who, unlike Starling, was given a comeuppance for being a willfully corrupted woman, fuck you post-credits scene), it seemed appropriate to have her sort of result from this pairing.
> 
> The "prêtre" in pâté de foie prêtre is a nod to Sweeney Todd (cannibalistic couples are a permanent mood). "Maroon flecked with sparks of sunstone-gold" comes from a description by Harris of the Mexican surgeon who was a key inspiration for the Lecter character. Bedelia's Promethean enlightenment references the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.


End file.
